The present invention relates to an apparatus for shredding waste material, and more particularly to such an apparatus having rotary oscillating shredding members.
Various apparatus for shredding waste material are known in the art. See for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,608,837, 3,502,276 and 2,894,697. In the above noted apparatus, the shredding members are continuously rotated at different speeds in opposite directions. Although entirely adequate for shredding most waste material, these apparatus are not readily adaptable for shredding flexible elongate material such as string or rope, casette tapes, video tapes or other magnetic recording type tape. Such waste material fed into these types of apparatus merely becomes wound about the shafts, blades and teeth of the individual shredding members until eventually the machine must be shut down to remove the entangled material.
Prior art shredding machines have also had problems with waste material sticking to the tips of the teeth of the shredding blades. These machines thus generally included some type of cleaning fingers positioned closely adjacent the teeth so that material is stripped from the teeth as the teeth pass the stationary fingers. In addition, prior art shredders do not provide any structure for conveniently and easily removing the blades of the shredding members for repair or replacement.
It is thus desirable to provide an improved apparatus for shredding not only conventional waste material such as glass, plastic, steel, or aluminum containers and paper products, but also one that will shred unconventional material such as rope and magnetic tape. It is also desirable to provide an apparatus which provides a convenient method of removing the shredder blades, and one that is self-cleaning to avoid the expense of replacing and/or repairing the cleaning fingers found on most presently available shredding machines.